Blood Feast (1963)
Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
In the sleepy suburbs of Miami, seemingly normal Egyptian immigrant Fuad Ramses runs a successful catering business. He also murders young women and plans to use their body parts to revive the goddess Ishtar. The insane Ramses hypnotizes a socialite in order to land a job catering a party for her debutante daughter, Suzette Fremont, and turns the event into an evening of gruesome deaths, bloody dismemberment and ritual sacrifice.
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What critics compared Blood Feast to
"May" has been described as a tribute to "Frankenstein," but it also recalls Herschell Gordon Lewis' notorious "Blood Feast" — except that McKee wisely trusts us to complete the film's horrors in our imagination.
House of 1000 Corpses is a bizarre horror flick by director Rob Zombie that owes a debt to the work of cult director Herschell Gordon Lewis, (the self-styled ‘Wizard of Gore’), particularly the films Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs.
Features like The Immoral Mr Teas (1959) and Blood Feast (1963) which exploited sex (or rather nudity) and/or violence were played in proper movie theatres and their willingness to show audiences things that the mainstream cinema would not often proved very profitable.
As long as Britain's Hammer Film had been in existence, one of its biggest calling cards was a level of gruesome content beyond anything the quivering Yanks were likely to produce, and five years before Romero and company hit the scene, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast was sold on the promise of literally nothing but the bloodiness of its death scenes, and is usually cited as the first movie to so centrally fixate on depicting gore.
Recent 1960s films which paved the way for NotLD - Psycho, making the locale for the horror contemporary America; The Birds (1963), providing a model for the NotLD situation; H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), the original splatter/gore movie; and Henk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), providing a model for the ghoul make up - are alluded to.
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And thus a whole new era was born, with more blood and gore: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the gore factor raised to a maximum by Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast (1963), Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), and culminating with John Carpenter's Halloween (1978).